


Peace Is Our Profession.

by Lanna Michaels (lannamichaels)



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Alternate Universe - Trans, Anger, F/F, Names, Trans Female Character, Trans Warlock Dowling, queer issues, switched at birth - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-29
Updated: 2020-11-29
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:35:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27787618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lannamichaels/pseuds/Lanna%20Michaels
Summary: Warlock goes back to Tadfield when she's twenty-four.
Relationships: Pepper/Warlock Dowling
Comments: 14
Kudos: 74
Collections: Trans Stories





	Peace Is Our Profession.

1.

Warlock goes back to the hospital where she was born in search of answers and finds a corporate retreat there instead.

That's probably symbolic of something, but Warlock Dowling already knew that you can't go home again.

2.

Warlock's tour of the place is conducted by a woman about her age who gives her name as Pepper. It's less of a headache than 'Warlock' is, but Warlock can't imagine that kind of name was easy to have either. Warlock wonders if Pepper used to get asked where Salt was, the same way folks had asked Warlock where Witch was.

She runs into Pepper again at the bar that night, so it must be fate that Pepper takes her home. Afterwards, Pepper says, drawing lines and swirls on Warlock's chest, that she'd been born Pippin Galadriel Moonchild. Pippin's a boy's name, so Pepper's parents were about as good at this as Warlock's were. Maybe there's something in the water in Tadfield that causes terrible children's names.

"Galadriel's not a terrible name," Warlock says, because she's heard worse and not even on her own birth certificate.

Pepper scoffs. "Yeah, for a _dog_. Or a fish. Not for anyone who has to go to school."

Warlock shrugs. It's not a competition, but if it was, she'd win for sure. That makes it easy not to argue about it.

Pepper scratches her nails lightly across Warlock's abdomen and Warlock inhales sharply, digging her heels suddenly into the mattress. Wow. Yeah, that's a new one. She didn't know she liked that so much. Pepper's grinning and Warlock likes that, too. She's learning all kinds of things here, just not what she came here for.

"I was a tomboy feminist and all my best friends growing up were boys," Pepper says. "A name that sounded like I was going to punch someone in the nose was all I wanted."

"You still friends with them?" Warlock asks. She's got one, maybe two friends still left from school, but she's not sure. It's hard to know who's actually a friend and who just hasn't gotten around yet to dropping her from their lives.

"Yep," Pepper says. "If you stick around for breakfast, you'll meet them. We always have breakfast together on Sunday mornings."

That's an invitation and Warlock's not too proud to eagerly accept. She's never spent the night with anyone. It's never been an option before. Warlock wonders where 'meeting the best friends' sits in the U-haul Lesbian scale. "Are they all boys?" Warlock says.

"The breakfast ones are," Pepper says. "My mother worried I'd end up married to one of them, because that's the two ways it can go, right? Either I marry one of them or I become a lesbian. Lesbianism seemed a better choice."

Warlock grins. "Oh, I don't know. There's still time to do both. Be a lesbian, _then_ pick one to marry."

Pepper rewards her by laughing, which is great. Warlock's sense of humor isn't for everyone; she's learned that the hard way. "I'd have to pick Brian, and break Adam and Wensley's hearts."

In the end, none of Pepper's friends for life seem the type to have their hearts broken over her. They greet Warlock like she's another one of Pepper's friends, nothing awkward about it at all, and Warlock wonders what it would be like to have had a friends group like that. Not just kids thrown together by parental careers, not just kids all shoved into the same terrible boarding school, but real, true, actual friends. Warlock wonders if Pepper knows how rare that is. Or maybe Warlock's just the odd one out here. She usually is.

Adam's the first one to arrive and he looks similar enough to Warlock that Warlock feels really really weird about it. Warlock's not sure Pepper notices; Warlock doesn't actually look much like that anymore. But. But looking at Adam is really fucking disquieting. It's like looking into a circus mirror. They're nothing like identical. But all their major features are really freakishly close to each other.

They couldn't pass as twins. They couldn't pass as siblings. They couldn't even pass as related. But--

They look much too alike.

Adam doesn't seem to notice either, which is great. Pepper's friends banter with each other easily as they put breakfast together in the kitchen. Wensley's brought pastries from the bakery, Brian has bread and sandwich fillings, and Adam's brought drinks. They're easy with each other like life-long friends can be and Warlock's never had. She wonders if she ever can have this. Maybe if she ever finds someone to settle down with. Maybe then.

None of The Them are weird about Warlock's name. She'd braced for it, the way she always does. She waits for the bad jokes and the strained comments that don't come. It's always a relief when it doesn't, but Warlock doesn't know how long it'll need to be for her to go without them for her to stop expecting them all the time.

Warlock had hoped that the nuns could explain how the fuck she got the name Warlock in the first place. Her mother had always brushed the question off, said it was a trendy name, or traditional, or that the nuns thought it was good luck. Her family doesn't even belong to a religion that has nuns; Warlock's never figured out what had really happened there, why her mother had gone along with it. Maybe it was just that her mother had wanted her son to stand out in a crowd. Maybe it was just that her mother hadn't thought about what it would be like to live with it. Her mom hadn't thought about what it would be like to live with a lot of things.

It is a little different lately, Warlock'll admit. That's one side effect of how Warlock is, it seems to have changed the way people view her name. It used to be something weird, a side elbow shoving her, asking what kind of parents she had. She'd even had one insufferable teacher in high school insist on calling her Arlo, as if that were any better. But these days, people think she's Warlock because she picked it. Somehow, that sometimes comes with respect, albeit often begrudging. But Warlock's been called cool, she's been called courageous, and she's only been called worse things by people who were already gonna call her that. Her name went from being an annoyance to being a sign of confidence. They think Warlock could have picked any name in the world for herself and this is what she picked.

This is not what Warlock picked, except she picked it by not picking anything else. After so long as Warlock, she's going to be Warlock until the bitter end. She suffered for it, so she gets to keep it. That's the bargain she's made, well, that's the bargain she's had to make with the goddamn godawful legacy her parents had given her when they'd saddled her with Warlock Lovecraft Faustus Dowling. No 'Arlo', no trying to force her into a different mold by means of calling her something else, is ever going to fix that

And The Them don't even blink at being introduced to Warlock, Pepper's One-Night Stand. That's one sign that Tadfield isn't as bad as Warlock had worried it would be.

Somehow they end up talking about Warlock's shitty family, probably because The Them know everything about each other, but know nothing about Warlock. That's fair, she thinks. She's fresh meat.

"I don't have a dad," Pepper says, commiserating. "At some point, I guess, but when my mother took me and moved back here, he didn't come with her, and whoever it is, he never visited or paid any bills. My mother got married when I was five and my stepdad's okay, but it's still different."

"I've got two dads," Adam offers. "One of them's the Devil, though, so I don't talk about him much."

Oh, yeah. Warlock knows all about dads who are the devil. She gives Adam a sympathetic wince.

Brian and Wensley have normal families, but they've watched a lot of soap operas and spent a lot of time playing games with Adam and Pepper, so they've got lots of ideas for how to enact revenge on Warlock's family, which Warlock appreciates, except that her revenge on her family is insisting on still using the Dowling name and never letting any of them forget it. They'd really love it if she changed her name to something else and disappeared. If she sticks around, they have to keep dealing with the fact that she's stuck around. But if she sticks around, then she has to deal with them, too. So she doesn't stick around much.

Still, she isn't going to stop using the name. They're the ones who gave it to her, so honestly, they can fuck off.

3.

You can't go home again. You can't even get answers to explain the basic question of your life. You can, however, get a girlfriend. Warlock'll take it. It's not like she's got any choice about the other part. All the nuns are retired.

It's not going to last; Warlock's not sticking around Tadfield forever. But she's also an aimless disaffected youth, so it's not like she's got much else better to do. Pepper finds Warlock a community center to volunteer at, and Warlock's good at anything that doesn't require her to be a people-person. She's never been charming. She's always been aware of how annoying she is. Over time, it's become a weapon, like her name, like her existence. People don't have to like her, but she's going to stand in front of them until they acknowledge that she's there. But she knows enough about life to mop floors that need mopped and wash dishes that need washed, because she'd been fourteen once and stared at her changing body and had a moment of profound horror so alarming, it'd changed everything for her. Warlock's cohort was spoiled little rich boys and she'd fit into that fine until she didn't. Warlock's classmates might get threatened with disinheritance from drugs and clubbing and really bad decisions. Warlock's gone one-up on all of them; she'd started wearing skirts and hired lawyers to make sure her parents couldn't take away the money she'd gotten from Aunt Patty. So, yeah, Warlock can wash floors. She's not too good enough for that. The only thing she's too good for is being a son.

Three months in Tadfield and Warlock finds out that the nuns were _Satanic nuns_.

"Did they... advertise that?" Warlock asks Adam, who looks at Pepper, who looks at Brian, who looks at Wensley, who looks back at Warlock like they're shadow-casting Rocky Horror Picture Show.

"I don't know, it burned down after we were born," Adam says.

"Then how do _you_ know?" Wensley asks.

"The angels told me," Adam says and Warlock rolls her eyes and that's when Warlock gets sat down and told that's not a joke and that there really are angels and there was an apocalypse -- but it's better now, Adam insists -- and that Adam was involved and that there was some baby-switching so that Adam got to be a Young instead of--

"Oh, right," Adam says, coming to a halt. "They mentioned they'd wanted me to be an American."

And then everyone looks at Warlock again like this is Rocky Horror Picture Show and Warlock just threw off a cape to show off her corset and fishnets and suddenly the world is different.

"We were switched at birth?" Warlock asks weakly. Goddammit, were her parents right? Was she really actually truly not their kid? Shit, no one better tell them. Warlock's main victory is that her parents have to live with how she turned out.

Adam squints at her and then squints at the far distance in, what Pepper whispers, is the direction of his house. "Yeah," Adam says eventually. "We were."

Brian's doing some math. "No, you weren't, there's still one other baby. You were extra."

Adam shrugs. "I guess."

Warlock could punch him. But it's not him she wants to punch. She wants to punch-- wait, so she's really Warlock Young? Her parents were going to name her Adam, her real parents, her real name? Warlock might never have had her shitty parents to begin with? She might have grown up like Adam had, with good parents who loved their kid? Warlock's going to punch _somebody_.

"It'd have to be someone else in Tadfield," Pepper says. "Who else-- oh."

"Oh," chorus The Them, and Warlock suddenly finds that she'd be perfectly fine punching all of them.

"We know someone who was adopted," Pepper says. "Uh, our enemy? He's probably less awful these days..."

Brian performatively shudders. " _Greasy Johnson_."

His parents named him Greasy? There's definitely got to be something in the Tadfield water, that's horrible, that's worse than Warlock. "So you think he's really me? That he should have been me?"

"Maybe?" Adam says. Pepper slugs him on the shoulder until Adam's eyes go distant again. "Yeah. Yeah, it's good old Greasy, he's the third one."

"His name cannot actually be Greasy," Warlock says, clinging to some kind of hope that she's still won the competition for terrible names.

"No, no, it's something normal. Gavin, I think? George?" Brian and Wensley confer with each other, heads bent.

"We call him Greasy because he's greasy," Adam contributes helpfully. Warlock has mostly had it with Adam being helpful. Where were these revelations when Warlock was eleven and still lived in this country and could have been switched back? She could have had a better life. She could have had one that wasn't this mess. And why didn't she? Because of Adam and his apocalypse.

She needs to punch someone, a lot.

She says so.

"I understand," Pepper says. Then she holds up some keys and Warlock could kiss her and she does. "How about paintball?"

4.

It's hard to date Pepper after that. It's hard to do _anything_ after that. Warlock trails off in the middle of sentences or gets stuck looking around at the houses and the people. This could have been her hometown. This _should_ have been her hometown. She should have had parents, good parents! She should have had an older sister. She should have a different accent. She should have known Pepper all her life. This was the life she was _supposed_ to have had. And she didn't have it!

And it wasn't her fault that she didn't have it! It wasn't that she'd ruined everything by being the way she was, the way everyone had always said. Nope, this life was stolen from her when she was born, with some incompetent supernatural beings and some incomprehensible plan. No one should have touched Warlock! This should have been a switch between Adam and Greasy Johnson, and Warlock could have been fine! She'd have grown up here and everything would have been perfect--

\--Warlock knows herself enough to know that, well, it wouldn't have been _perfect_. She'd have fucked it up somehow, that's what she does. But she'd at least have been able to try. And she didn't even get that.

It's hard to look at Pepper and see 'stranger who I'm growing to like a lot'. She wants Pepper to have been her friend this whole time. She wants to know Pepper as well as Pepper knows The Them. Warlock wants so much it hurts. It hasn't felt this way in years. Warlock'd thought she was over this.

She wasn't over this.

She holds hands with Pepper and tries, she tries, she does, but everything Warlock knew about her life is now a bright red sore in her head and touching it makes her flinch and she still can't stop touching it. This is wrong, everything is wrong, it never should have been like this. Warlock should have been happy. She never should have had to deal with any of this. Tadfield is some bucolic place out of a storybook and this could have been Warlock's all her life. And she could move here, she could keep dating Pepper, but that wouldn't give it back to her. She'd just be trying to weave something out of hurt and bitterness. She can't erase what happened. Even if she tried, it wouldn't work. She can't run away from Warlock Dowling, it's why she never bothered trying.

Warlock's always known that she's herself and that there's no one to blame for that than her. Except now there is something else to blame. Now there's something very clearly at fault for Warlock Dowling. She never should have existed in the first place. Warlock should be Adam Young. She never should have known that Thaddeus and Harriet Dowling even existed.

She can't pretend her way into being a daughter of Tadfield. She was conceived here. She was born here. She came back here. But-- but it'd be pretend, wouldn't it? It'd be a game. She can't become Warlock Young. She can be Warlock Dowling who moved to Tadfield, who got a job, who started a new life. But she can't get back the rest of it. It was stolen for good. Even if she got lawyers involved, what would that solve? She wants to walk into Adam's home and be welcomed and that can happen. Adam can introduce her to their parents. Warlock can try to build a relationship with them. But they're not going to say that Warlock's their real kid. It'd just hurt everyone to do that. Warlock doesn't want to hurt _them_. Unlike the Dowlings, the Youngs have never done anything to her. Warlock would rather be one of Adam's friends, someone who needs, who longs for, more parenting than what she got. But she can't be their kid.

She can treat this as Day 1, if she wants. If she wants to ignore all the time that got stolen, that she can never get back, she can do that. It'd just hurt worse than anything she's ever done before. How is she supposed to look at them without hating everything about it? Warlock knows what it's like to hate everything about your life; that's why she's here in the first place.

She could laugh. She'd wanted answers. And she has them. She has too many of them. Her life was never supposed to be this much of a mystery! She just wanted to know why her mother had saddled her with this name. She just wanted to know what had happened when she was born, how she'd got put on this track, how 'Warlock Dowling, Disappointment' got started.

And it turned out that it didn't. Warlock should have been someone else this entire time. Twenty-four years of her life were never supposed to have been hers at all.

Someone once told Warlock about opportunity costs and about sunk cost fallacies. She's put so much time and effort into being Warlock Dowling, into making Warlock Dowling into herself. All that time shouldn't mean she's stuck being Warlock Dowling even if she doesn't want to be anymore -- even if she never was Warlock Dowling to begin with. But she can't shed that skin. She's been Warlock Dowling since she was a few hours old. How is she supposed to stop? It's not like there's a manual for this. It's not like she knows what she even wants, not for things that she can have. She wants all this to have never happened, but she can't have that, so it's pointless to want that, it's pointless to be so angry, so incandescently enraged. It shouldn't keep her up at night, it shouldn't keep distracting her, what might have been, what actually was, what she could still have, what she never can.

She was never supposed to be her. The person who had her upbringing was supposed to destroy the world. They made her too well. She's got the anger and none of the powers. That's probably for the best. Warlock's not sure what she'd do if she had Adam's powers. None of it would be good.

Adam's powers...

What if the Youngs had come back from the hospital with two babies instead of one? What if the miracle that had taken place hadn't been an extra baby but that the Deirdre Young had given birth to twins? Let Greasy go home with Warlock's parents, maybe they'd be happier with him than they'd been with her. What if Warlock could have been Adam's sister the whole time?

Why should Warlock be miserable? Let her have this. Let her run through this town like a native daughter, like she owns it, like she has a right to be here, like she's never a visitor. Let her have a rival gang to her twin brother. Let them fight over who gets to control the pond, over who has to go walk the dog, over whose turn it is to trim the hedge. Let her be happy. Why can't she be happy? Why does she have to be Warlock Dowling?

Warlock can't remember a time when she was ever uncomplicatingly happy. There must have been a time once, but it's not like her parents were ever the type to sit around and reminisce about how adorable Warlock had been or tell stories about all the fun she'd had putting things on her head, or whatever it is that fond parents talk about. All Warlock's ever heard about any of that from her parents was how much more they'd liked her when she'd still been young enough to easily ignore. But there must have been a time when she didn't feel like this all the time. There must have been a time before.

She doesn't know. 

Seems like she still needs more answers. 

5.

In Jasmine College in Tadfield lives Adam Young's adopted sister. Unlike other noted prior residents of Jasmine Cottage, she is neither a witch nor a rocket scientist. Instead, she's an American, but some think she's from London and has never been to America at all. She lives on _family money_. No, she doesn't, she has a blog about baseball statistics, my cousin showed me! Stupid, you can't make a living writing on the internet about baseball. It's 'cause she's rich that she can do that.

Sometimes kids who peaked into Jasmine Cottage would see her pacing the floor in long strides, talking on the telephone, sounding very important. She threatens to sue people a lot, usually people with her last name. Everyone calls her Warlock, except for Gavin Johnson and the Johnsonites, who call her Dowwers and she lets them, even though The Them and The Johnsonites are still being terrible role models for the younger generation and should let bygones be bygones by now, Mrs. Johnson always says. It's good that Adam Young's sister ignores that childishness completely. Warlock and Gavin Johnson go drinking together all the time.

Sometimes she walks around with Pepper Fairfax from Tadfield Manor. Jessa thinks they're dating, but that's being small-minded. Just because both Ms. Dowling and Ms. Fairfax are like that, it doesn't mean they're like that _together_. Don't be stereotypical.

At night, Warlock looks out of the window toward Tadfield Manor and, maybe, all the way off to America. And then she turns around, tightens her ponytail, and gets back to being herself.

**Author's Note:**

> [this post on dreamwidth](https://lannamichaels.dreamwidth.org/1165016.html); [this post on tumblr](https://lannamichaels.tumblr.com/post/636167347413139457/peace-is-our-profession-lanna-michaels)


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